Tag Archives: Military

The Israeli army knows a thing or two about urban warfare. They’ve been at it, for better or for worse, for the last 60 years or so. And one of the many difficulties in that environment is that when a soldier is down, evacuation can be tricky. Usually it involves another soldier using his arms to carry the downed troop, but that also means that he can’t use his weapon. That’s bad. The Injured Personnel Carrier (IPC), developed by Agilite, is a specially designed harness/backpack that can allow a single person to carry another on his back while keeping the use of his arms. It’s easily deployed in a few seconds and folds into a tiny, easy to carry package.

The best part is that it’s not limited to the military. Perfect for hiking trips or any sort of situation that might require you to carry someone who is injured or incapacitated. And at $80, it’s almost wrong not to bring along with you.

Milled out of a 13.5 pound 6061 T6 aluminum block, the OPMOD Battle Mug is about as hardcore a mug as money can buy. It features 3 military spec rails that let you mount just about any accessory that you would normally mount on a rifle: scopes, night vision sights, lasers, you name it. The handle itself is the handle from an AR-15 rifle which was mounted onto one of the rails. It holds 24 ounces of liquids and has a Mil Spec Type III Anodized finish. And as cool as it looks bare, it’s really only once you start decking it out with the accessories that it gets a personality.

Of course, none of this is cheap. The mug itself is $250. The accessories… well, the OPMOD PVS-14 Gen III Night Vision Monocular sight for example is a hair under $3k. Pocket change really, for what is undoubtedly the manliest mug in the market.

This product has been used in battle for the last couple of years and now it appears you can get your own. It’s called the BattleView Infrared Vascular Trans-illuminator and is made specifically for situations where using visible light might get you killed. Like setting up triage on the side of a mountain at night in Afghanistan for example, where lighting your helmet light simply gives the enemy a beacon for your location. The BattleView features 4 near-infrared LEDs running off a single 3-volt CR123A lithium battery. Put it on a patient’s hand (or other body part) and the venous blood will fluoresce making it instantly visible to anyone wearing night vision goggles. You’re then free to get your IV going as if it was broad daylight.

Unmanned aircraft such as surveillance drones are really nothing compared to the stuff the Air Force is working on. Miniaturization marches onwards and gives rise to the sort of little devices you see in the picture.

At the Micro-Aviary at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, researchers rig the walls with super-sensitive motion capture sensors that track a tiny plane or helicopter’s position ”within about a tenth of an inch,” according to researcher Greg Parker. Information from those sensors helps engineers develop “flapping-wing flight” drones — “very, very small flapping-wing vehicles,” in Parker’s phrase.

And how. One of the vehicles on display in the video above, released by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Pat, is a robot dragonfly. It doesn’t appear to be much more than a circuit board, a super-tiny motor and two insect-like wings

No camera on that “insect” yet. However we can deduct a couple of things from the information that is given to us. The bleeding edge of military research is always and understandably classified. So if we’re being shown something like this little dragonfly in the picture, you can make a safe bet that there’s something far more advanced already in production. What shape this technology would have is pure speculation, but this writer is picturing this: swarms of semi-autonomous insect-sized flying bots with video reconnaissance capabilities, all simultaneously feeding back to a base station. They’d be impossible to fully shoot down and would be indistinguishable from actual insects. Are we there yet? There’s no way to know right now.

The US’s military drones can do a bunch of things, but they aren’t the only drones in town. Currently in development by the Japanese Defense Ministry, the ball-shaped drone you see in the picture (and in the video below) can do some things regular drones can’t. Its spherical shape allows it to roll around the ground and land pretty much anywhere. It can takeoff vertically, but once in flight can deploy wings for forward travel at 60km/h (that’s 37 mph for you Yanks). If it hits an obstacle, it simply keeps on trucking like nothing happened (watch the demonstrator in the video slap it around some).

The prototype you see in the video was made with commercially available parts costing around $1,400. But that also means that it’s nowhere near final specification as production models will likely have parts engineered specifically for it. Consider this a proof of concept, so that 8 minute flight autonomy is more than likely to increase with later iterations. Currently it weighs 350g (12 ounces?) and is meant primarily as a reconnaissance craft.

While the fighting has not completely subsided, it appears as though Gaddafi’s regime has all but crumbled and the revolution in Libya was successful. Initially described as a ragtag group of disorganized youths, Libya’s rebels managed to topple the Colonel’s 42 year rule with the help of NATO… but also from a Waterloo, Ontario company called Aeryon Labs. They’ve been providing the Transitional National Council with the Aeryon Scout, a small surveillance drone which the company describes thusly:

The Aeryon Scout is a small, easy-to-fly man-packable flying robotic reconnaissance system design for operation in real-world, harsh conditions. It weighs just 3 pounds, packs into a suitcase or a backpack and can be quickly and easily deployed and operated by soldiers in the field. Instead of using joysticks, the Scout uses a map-based, touch-screen interface that allows new users to pilot the system in just minutes. The Scout essentially flies itself allowing the operator to focus on acquiring imagery.

Current techniques for locating snipers (besides a well-trained pair of eyes) involve sophisticated microphone setups, which are essentially useless until the sniper fires a shot, at which point it could be already too late. But the CS300K Counter Surveillance Camera, from a company called JETprotect, promises to spot sniper scopes, binoculars, cameras and even human eyeballs from hundreds of meters away using the ‘red-eye’ effect that’s wrecked so many photos over the years.

The CS300K uses an integrated “unique wavelength GigE Vision IP camera” in conjunction with a “numerically controlled Class IIIb laser illuminator” and special automatic surveillance software to monitor for threats around the clock, providing warnings when something is spotted. The initial applications for the technology will involve military and security duties where prying eyes or scopes are a serious threat, but I’m sure it will eventually trickle down to the consumer level so you can use your cellphone to monitor that creepy guy on the subway who’s been occasionally staring at you for the past 15 minutes.

There are two places where bomb-proof wallpaper would come in really, really handy: war zones, and college. I guess college is less deadly most of the time, but you also don’t have the US Government offering to step in and pay for replacement drywall after your roommate decides that it would be fun to try and kick his way through to the adjoining room by swinging from your bunk bed. Thanks, Logan.

X-Flex wallpaper is made from a “Kevlar-like material” (Kevlar itself being a trademark of DuPont, in case you were wondering) sandwiched between an elastic polymer wrap. It’s lightweight, portable, and a cinch to install relative to the protection it offers: you just peel off the back, stick it to the wall, and bolt it to the ceiling and floor and you’re done. You can even wallpaper or paint over it if you don’t like the color. Popular Science put X-Flex to the test with a wrecking ball as you’ll see in the video below, but to forestall any objections, you can also see X-Flex withstanding an actual bomb blast on their website.

For those of you who are especially paranoid, it’s certainly worth mentioning that X-Flex is not actually intended to protect against ballistics, like bullets or shrapnel, just blasts and blunt impacts like bombs and drunken roommates. A commercial version of the military grade wallpaper is due out next year.

Looking for a badass new yacht for free? Sea Shadow, commissioned by DARPA and now a US Navy castoff, is about as badass as it gets. You may be familiar with Sea Shadow from the Bond move Tomorrow Never Dies, but it’s a real ship, and it’s really stealthy. It’s 160 feet long, and comes with 12 bunks, a table, a microwave, a fridge, and a gigantic covered mining barge that the CIA used to keep Sea Shadow protected from satellite surveillance. The catch is that you have to take the barge too, and getting anything for free from the Navy is apparently “a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money-sucking hole…” Why does that not surprise me.

If nobody comes up with an offer, Sea Shadow (which originally cost nearly $200 million) is going to be scrapped at the end of this year.

OhGizmo! is a frequently updated blog that focuses on covering items that will appeal to a very specific and often very passionate audience: the geek. Aside from the fare of innovative consumer electronic products, the reader can expect to find news about geek culture, absurd inventions, awe inspiring technology, and an ever growing assortment of articles that we like to think fit within our view of what we’re calling the Geek Lifestyle.